Ryan Witmer

NO ONE NOTICED MY POOKA SHIRT!

I'll be in costume for that one, and I'll sign it in-character.

Got my copy of Baby Pacman, which I'm just ecstatic about. Saw some great demos there too. For me, the "game of the booth" was Zoo Keeper. People were swooning over Galagon, but I've never been a big Galaga fan, although I appreciate how impressive that version is. Zoo Keeper was just amazing, and is a must buy for me when it comes out. Also, 7800 Arkanoid. That looked and sounded way better than I expected it to, and the paddle support completely sold me on it.

@sramirez2008 now has the only signed copies of Ratcatcher and RealSports Curling. I don't even have any of those! So here's a picture of us after I signed his Ratcatcher. The Fairy Force demo is right behind us. I also found a copy of Zone Ranger, which makes me really happy. Only 9 games left to find!

Hey! A 5200 game!

I'd like to add that the 5200 is, in my esteemed opinion, the best looking game console ever designed. Even if you never play the thing, it's worth having one sitting out because it just looks so cool. I would say that it's also the only place to play RealSports Curling, but some ne'er-do-wells went and ported it to the Atari computers.

I use Atari++ for my development, and I've also tested extensively on real hardware. I've never tried any other emulator. What's probably happening is that you don't have controller 2 configured correctly. The demo is strictly two-player.

I'll render an appropriate salute should I bump into him.

There's really not much to play in this demo, sadly. You can mostly just ooh and aah at the pretty pictures.

Alright, this be my PRGE demo build. This is a weird build, considering my original plans. I was going to do only two characters, but with all their gameplay details completed. Instead I ended up with the full cast of eight characters, but with basically none of their gameplay details in there. Oh well. There are two known bugs in this build. The first is that the shots fired by the stars occasionally have a totally bizarre aiming behavior and just go off in the wrong direction. I'm almost certainly going to rewrite this logic completely, so I'm not bothering to fix this one. The other bug is purely cosmetic. Something causes the color table for the upper player's portrait image to get screwed up. I've seen this before, and came up with ways to fix it that made no sense to me. This current incarnation of the bug is much more rare, and so far I haven't been able to narrow down exactly what causes it. Since it doesn't affect gameplay at all, I'm not going to waste any more time trying to correct it for this demo. For future reference, the ROM has the identifying string "PRGE 2019 demo" embedded 256 bytes from the end. I'm probably going to spend the weekend away from this project, since I've been pounding away at it for the last month to get it ready for PRGE. Once I get back to work, I have lots to do! Still targeting an early 2020 release. Enjoy the demo! fairy_force.bin

Cool. Hopefully I'll bump into somebody there. Looking forward to it.

I've seen threads like this in a few other system forums, so I thought I'd put one here. Who among the 5200 faithful is planning to be at this year's Portland Retro Gaming Expo? I'll be there on Saturday. I'll probably get to the convention center around 11:30 and will be there pretty much the rest of the day. I'll be wandering about shopping and periodically checking the AtariAge booth to make sure that nobody has broken my Magical Fairy Force demo. If you see the tall skinny guy in the Seattle Storm hat and the bright red Dig Dug Pooka t-shirt, that's me. Feel free to grab me and make me tell you all about the effort that went into the RealSports Curling physics... or don't.

It turns out I'm just not going to have enough time to get special attacks in for all the characters. I've also been doing some thinking lately and I've got some interesting new ideas for how I want to handle these. In light of this, I've decided to cut what little I had done on these for the PRGE demo. All is not wasted though, as I've gotten the basic framework for the character attacks in place and have written some useful support functions. I'm going to spend this week addressing some bugs and doing some polish here and there. I'm hoping to get a few primitive sound effects in there, if nothing else. So, here's what you can expect from the PRGE demo: 8 selectable characters Trak-ball support A few things to shoot and get shot by A fully functioning 2 player mode Hopefully, no existing bugs I plan to have the demo ROM ready by Saturday, and will post it here so anyone that isn't attending PRGE can try it out.

I love Super Pacman, and the 5200 port is really good, except for the fact that it controls really badly with the stock 5200 joysticks, at least for me. I don't have any difficulty with the other Pacman games on the system, just this one. I opted for Bob's excellent 7800 version instead, but if you don't have a 7800 and can deal with the controller issues, the 5200 port is probably worth getting.

The stuff you can do with scrolling tricks is actually pretty amazing and any decent Galaga port is going to make crazy use of this stuff. I still remember when I was playing Space Invaders and it dawned on me that the alien formation was really just a scrolling background, in effect. At least I'm pretty sure it is. I'm trying to make use of some these tricks right now in my current project, and although I'm not on the Galaga train, I'd love to see how someone pulls it off.

Don't need Galaga. Galaxian has always been the better game anyway. Yes, I just went there.

So, I got the first of the character specific effects kinda-sorta in place this weekend. I started with Ratcatcher veteran Pork-Chop, who can use his ratcatching net to slow down the other player. There's a neat little graphical effect for this, which you can see in progress in this screenshot. This attack will slow down the other player's movement for a few seconds, making it more difficult to dodge and generally react to things. While this particular attack isn't all that special, by getting this done I've established the foundation of the attack system and written a few useful pieces of code that can applied to some of the other characters. This first one is definitely the hardest, and they should be easier from here on out. Will I have all of the attacks ready for PRGE? Maybe. Of course, anything I have ready may be changed drastically for the final product. (Sorry, no more character art!)

I'm not a hardware guy, but I'm a 5200 programmer with an interest in the 7800, and from my understanding a device like this would probably be possible. The 5200 and 7800 use the exact same 6502C CPU, as far as I can tell, so the 7800's processor should be able to natively run 5200 code. That being said, I'm not sure if differences in the bus configuration would allow the code to work correctly, and any adapter might need to contain its own 6502C. The 5200 has 16KB of RAM, whereas the 7800 only has 4KB, so an adapter would need to include this extra RAM. I doubt it would be possible to simply extend the 7800's RAM with another 12KB, so it would probably need the full 16KB. The adapter would also need to contain a GTIA, ANTIC, and POKEY chip. GTIA and ANTIC are the graphics chips in the 5200 and I'm not sure how easy those are to come by these days. The 7800 only uses POKEY for sound when it's present, from what I understand, but the 5200 uses POKEY for a whole lot more. In the 5200, POKEY is responsible for scanning everything on the controllers except for the primary trigger, which GTIA handles for historical reasons. It also does random number generation and few timer related things, so it's an essential component of the system. I doubt that the 7800 controllers could be used at all, even with 5200 games that don't use the keypad. The digital signals from the controllers would somehow need to be mapped to analog signals that POKEY recognizes, and I doubt the 7800's circuitry could do that in a way that would work. I state again that I'm not really a hardware guy, so I could be wrong about a lot of this.

I am too!

Progress continues, and I've gotten a number of bug fixes and tweaks in place. The biggest thing I still want to get done for PRGE is the character attack system. This is where the different characters will truly separate from each other. Right now I'm working on getting all the plumbing in place to support the different character attacks, and it's basically ready. When you've accumulated enough fairy power, your gauge will turn green to indicate that an attack is available. Pressing the second trigger button will make your attack and consume some of your fairy power. Use these attacks to pressure your opponent into mistakes and hopefully win the game! I'm trying to put the first of these attacks into place right now. After I get one working, I expect the others will follow fairly quickly, assuming I can think of things. I really want to have these available for Portland, although there's a good chance that whatever I come up with will change between PRGE and the game's final release. I'm also playing around a bit with sound effects and maybe even some simple music. That would be nice for PRGE, but that place is really loud so I'm not even sure you could hear anything I put in there at this point.

Now it's time to look at the various things that are currently present in the game. The final game will almost certainly have more stuff, and I might even get some new things in place for Portland, but at the very least these things will be in the demo: So here's what's going on here: Clouds: Clouds randomly drift through the fairy arena. Contact with clouds will sap your flight power, so they should be avoided! Clouds can be shot and destroyed, and you'll want to do this as often as you can because destroying enough clouds will generate... Fairy dust: Fairy dust appears after you've shot enough clouds. Collecting fairy dust will restore some of your flight power, keeping you in the air. So to sum up, blast the clouds to generate fairy dust so you replenish your flight power. Don't touch the clouds, because you will lose flight power. Simple! Player shot: This is the basic player shot, fired by pressing the primary trigger. Shots are fired toward the center of the screen. Lots of things can be shot! Shooting stars: Shooting stars appear near the center of the playfield and shoot at you! (GET IT?! THEY'RE "SHOOTING" STARS) Destroying shooting stars generates fairy power that can be used to attack your opponent in some character-specific manner. Star shot: These are the projectiles fired by the shooting stars. They will damage you, and four hits from them will kill you and cost you the game!